The actor:	Daniel Kaluuya
The character:	Fred Hampton
The film:	Judas and the Black Messiah
The line:	“I am! A revolutionary!”

If you’re a regular churchgoer, you’ve heard the one about how Jesus wasn’t some sedate guy who preached love and chill vibes. Jesus had a bite to him, whether he was doing some of his big public appearances like flipping tables in the temple or, the day before, cursing a fig tree that wasn’t bearing any fruit and representing Israel to boot. In the movies, though, Jesus never seems to do much more than get testy with the moneychangers. For so much of those films, he’s a man on benzos, even moving slowly because of how much wise, holy ichor runs through his veins. The most popular version, the Jesus of The Passion of the Christ, barely gets a chance to be anything but torpidly persecuted given all the nasty things that happen to him after he invents the table.

Jesus figures in movies (R.P. McMurphy, Klaatu, and so on) are kind of mixed bag. McMurphy has no ichor, instead relying on the proverbial piss and vinegar. There’s a Christ with a small audience but with vim missing from the vast majority of other Christs. Klaatu is a little snippy with his human audience from time to time, but his presentation with children particularly is tranquil as a snowy meadow. Heck, the guy gets murdered and he still doesn’t raise his voice.

The only film Jesus I can think of offhand with a little edge to him is the Jesus of Jesus Christ Superstar, a movie which is actively revisionist and anachronistic about the last week of Jesus’s life. Ted Neeley plays Jesus with that screeching bad temper, with some passive-aggressive vanity, with a moodiness befitting a man who has a bad, bad feeling that God wants him to die a terrible death.

I’m fairly sure that Jesus wasn’t singing Andrew Lloyd Webber while he kept his vigil in Gethsemane, but in Mark, the Gospel we should take most seriously, it says that Jesus told his disciples that his “soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” That Jesus never seems to come through. The passion of Christ yields to the passion of the Christ.

Fred Hampton, the Black Messiah, is the most passionate movie Jesus since Ted Neeley, and more than that he is hands down the most emphatic one I’ve ever seen. A movement cannot be made up simply of people who close their eyes slowly and hold hands loosely. No movement can be sustained without intense feeling and devotion. Daniel Kaluuya’s Fred Hampton made my eyes flash and my heart race. I believed in an actor playing a guy. I would have put down an awful lot of my life for Fred Hampton if he was anything like Daniel Kaluuya in this movie. And the film finds ways to make us believe in Fred Hampton like Jesus of Nazareth. “I am!” he starts. A roaring crowd echoes him. “A revolutionary!” They do it again. It’s hypnotic.